EMROC’s Steering Committee members oversee the group’s mission and organization.

Elaine Leong is a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin and leads the Minerva Research Group ‘Reading and Writing Nature in Early Modern Europe’. She gained her doctorate in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 2006. Before joining the MPIWG, Leong was a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge and a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. In 2006 and 2007, she held short-term fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library. Leong’s article ‘Making Medicines in the Early Modern Household’, (82, 2008) was awarded the 2009 J. Worth Estes Prize by the American Association for the History of Medicine and the 2010 Jerry Stannard Award. Her recent publications include Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and and Science 1500-1800 (edited with Alisha Rankin, Ashgate 2011), ‘Collecting Knowledge for the Family: Recipes, Gender and Practical Knowledge in the Early Modern English Household‘, Centaurus (55, 2013) and ‘Herbals she Peruseth: Reading Medicine in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Studies (forthcoming, 2014). (Since 2012)

Hillary M. Nunn is Professor of English at The University of Akron.  Her current research focuses on intersections between Renaissance literary culture and the era’s domestic medical texts and cookery books.  She is the author of Staging Anatomies:  Dissection and Tragedy in the Early Stuart Era (Ashgate, 2005), as well as “On Vegetating Virgins:  Greensickness and the Plant Realm in Early Modern Literature” in the collection The Indistinct Human in Renaissance Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and “Home Bodies: Matters of Weight in Renaissance Women’s Medical Manuals” in the volume The Body in Medical Culture (SUNY, 2009). (Since 2012)

Jennifer Munroe is an Associate Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where she teaches courses in early modern English poetry and prose, Shakespeare, ecocriticism, gender studies, literary theory, and film. She is author of Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature (Ashgate, 2008) and editor of Making Gardens of Their Own: Gardening Manuals For Women, 1550-1750 (Ashgate, 2007). Munroe is also co-editor with Rebecca Laroche of Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity (Palgrave, 2011) and with Lynne Bruckner and Ed Geisweidt of Ecological Approaches to Early Modern Texts (Ashgate, 2015). She has published articles in Tulsa Studies for Women’s Literature, Prose Studies, and Pedagogy, Shakespeare Studies, and Early English Studies. She is co-author (with Rebecca Laroche) of Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory (forthcoming, Arden). Her current book project, Mothers of Science: Women, Nature, and Writing in the Seventeenth Century in England, is an ecofeminist literary history of science that examines the relationship between women and nonhumans (plants and animals) in everyday and literary practices in seventeenth-century England. (Since 2012)

Margaret Simon is an assistant professor in the English Department at North Carolina State University. Her research focuses on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, material cultures, history of the emotions, and early modern writing practices. Her work on the Sidney Circle appears in Studies in English Literature, The Sidney Journal, and Studies in Philology. She has also published on George Gascoigne and on printed marginalia in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Dr. Simon’s current research concerns materiality and comparative media studies, looking to how early modern printed texts rendered objects in language and graphic technologies. Most recently, a multi-media project created with her colleague, Helen Burgess, entitled Intimate Fields appears as the fourth Kit for Cultural History archived by the University of Victoria’s MLab in the Humanities. An article related to the project, “Posies as Poetical Fugitives,” appears in thresholds: a digital journal of criticism. (Since 2018)

Lisa Smith is a Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Essex. She has published widely on gender, health and the household in England and France (ca. 1670-1789). She is particularly interested in domestic medical practices, such as the role of the family, men’s caregiving, fertility treatments and blurred magic and medicine. Lisa is the principal investigator of the SSHRC-funded Sir Hans Sloane’s Correspondence Online project, blogs at The Sloane Letters Project, co-edits the academic research blog The Recipes Project and can be found on twitter @historybeagle. (Since 2012)

Founding Members:

Rebecca Laroche is Professor of English at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She has published on Shakespeare, early modern women’s writing, medical history, and ecofeminism.  In 2009, her monograph Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 was published with Ashgate. In 2011, she was the guest-curator of the exhibition “Beyond Home Remedy:  Women, Medicine, and Science” at the Folger Shakespeare Library and co-editor (with Jennifer Munroe) of Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity.  She is currently considering the importance of the collective experiential knowledge of plants in Shakespeare’s oeuvre and co-authoring, with Jennifer Munroe, Shakespeare and Ecofeminist Theory. (2012–2019)

Amy L. Tigner is the author of Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II: England’s Paradise (Ashgate, 2012) and is an associate professor in the English Department at University of Texas, Arlington. She is editor-in-chief of the online journal Early Modern Studies Journal. Amy has published in ELR, Modern Drama, Milton Quarterly, Drama Criticism and Early Theatre, and she has contributed to essay collections: Global Traffic: Discourses and Practices of Trade in English Literature and Culture from 1550 to 1700, eds. Barbara Sebeck and Stephen Deng, and Ecofeminist Approaches to Early Modernity, eds. Jennifer Munroe and Rebecca Laroche. She co-editing with David Goldstein Culinary Shakespeare and co-authoring with Allison Carruth Literature and Food Studies. She served on the EMROC Steering Committee fro 2012 to 2018.